office romances
by xCaligula
Summary: "Emilia is one of the most promising hires I've seen in my time with the company. Honestly, the project I'm working on right now would be lost without her contributions!" Part two of my Shingen x Emilia series


It doesn't take long for Emilia to realize that Dr. Kishitani was lying to her and that her attempts to speak to him in Japanese were likely just as garbled as any other attempts of hers were. She realizes this, and she's embarrassed by her attempt and by the fact that he tried to make her feel better about it, but more than that, she thinks she might be flattered.

Really, she isn't sure how exactly to describe how she feels, but it's a good feeling, and she develops a quick fondness for the man. The first time she works with him, he insists that she call him by his first name, and it sticks on tongue the rest of the day, and once she's home, she closes the door behind her and whispers it to herself. She isn't quite sure why.

~X~

Her coworkers treat her strangely from the beginning, but it takes her some time to figure out what's going on. At first, she tries to convince herself that they're just trying to adjust to having a new employee, or even that she's imagining it because she's paranoid. She's so young and inexperienced, and this is a big transition for her, after all; it's only natural for her to be nervous and to potentially perceive things as worse than they are.

But then she overhears a conversation that she knows she isn't meant to when she forgets something and heads back to a lab to get it. She hovers outside the door when she hears her name, and she listens to the things that they say about her, heart sinking.

"She's a sweet kid, sure, but I just don't know how Emilia landed the job here," one of them says.

"She's smart," the other replies, "but it's not like she has any relevant experience. The only _experience_ she has... _well_." They snicker, and the other person pauses before joining in the laughter.

"You're _awful_!"

"Tell me you can't see it."

"Young, pretty girl, with a body like that? Definitely. There's no way someone like her didn't sleep around to get ahead."

"Oh, hey, she left her clipboard in here. She's such a ditz sometimes."

When she hears them mention the object she came back for, she returns to her senses and flees, hoping that nobody comes looking for her for a while. She tries not to cry over what they said, but it takes only a few minutes for the tears to start to fall.

~X~

Knowing what they think about her, she begins to notice even more about their behavior where she's concerned, and it becomes easier to tell which of her coworkers think that she did not earn her position honestly. She begins worrying about Shingen, and what his opinion of her is, though she isn't sure why he comes to her mind so quickly when she has only worked with him a few times. However, she finds herself wondering what he thinks most of all.

When she gets to work with him next, she scrutinizes him for signs that he thinks she's nothing but a silly, ditzy girl who used her sex appeal to get as far as she has in life, but it's hard to tell what he's thinking due to the gas mask he is prone to wearing. She tries to read his body language around her, not letting his lack of visible facial expression get in the way of her attempt to figure out his opinion of her.

She's never even seen his face before, but she was warned about his habit before she met him, so it didn't surprise her and she's already used to it. In fact, she thinks it looks kind of cool and gives him an air of mystery, and mystery has always interested her. She doesn't even wonder much about what he actually looks like, though a part of her hopes that he looks as handsome as his voice sounds, and she _really_ doesn't know where that thought came from.

In the end, he doesn't treat her like the others do, and instead is more like one of her past teachers, which she thinks must be a good thing. It probably means that he doesn't look at her and immediately assume that she isn't as smart as her records claim, but somehow, she still isn't entirely satisfied with the way he treats her.

~X~

She is locked in an uncomfortable conversation with a man in the break room when Shingen steps in. He had been making thinly veiled remarks, asking about her grades in school and how she had managed to graduate so early and move through the upper levels of education at her age, and she could tell what he meant, even if he thought he was being subtle. She isn't as stupid and everyone seems to think that she must be.

"There you are, Miss Emilia," he says loudly, entering the room without warning. She and the man she is talking to both jump a little bit, but Shingen doesn't seem bothered by the fact that he's surprised them. "I've been looking all over for you!"

"You have?" she asks.

"Yes, of course," he replies. "I wanted to talk to you about some of the research we discussed the last time we worked together. I think I might need your help to make sense of some new potential discoveries, and how they factor in with what we talked about last time." Her heartbeat is so loud that she can hear it and she has to fight off a grin.

"Do you two work together often?" asks the other man.

"Naturally," says Shingen, as if it should be obvious. "Emilia is one of the most promising hires I've seen in my time with the company. Honestly, the project I'm working on right now would be lost without her contributions!" He chuckles and invites her along, and she follows behind him.

It isn't until they get to their destination and she sees that there are others there- they have never worked one on one- and feels a wave of disappointment that she realizes that she has a crush on the older man.

~X~

She spends the rest of the day in a fog, completely blown away by her new discovery, and no amount of thinking on it can help her sort it out. Her feelings make perfect sense once she views them under a romantic lens, but that doesn't make the fact that she has a crush on one of her coworkers any easier to deal with. And she doesn't just have a crush on anyone, she has a crush on _Shingen_.

He is, she thinks, her only friend in this job, and the only person she's felt completely comfortable around, so maybe it makes sense that she would fall for him, but falling for him will spoil all of that. Now, she isn't sure if she'll ever be able to be comfortable around him again. And he's so much _older_ than her- he's talked about his son before, and she knows for a fact that she's younger than that man as well. She knows that he's currently single and that the mother isn't in the picture, but that doesn't really change the fact that his son is older than her.

And even if he doesn't treat her differently, she starts to worry more about the rumors about her circulating. For all she knows, he just hasn't heard any of them yet, and she worries about what might happen if he does. More than anything, she doesn't want Shingen thinking less of her or treating her differently, but there isn't much she can do to prevent him from hearing things that are said when she's not around. She hardly gets ant sleep that night as a result.

Emilia knows that her crush is going to end disastrously whether she decides to pursue it or not. She knows that it's incredibly unlikely that an older, smarter, mysterious man that she also happens to work with will ever like her back, and she knows that's incredibly likely that he'll hear someone talking about her and that his opinion of her will be changed. A romantic relationship with him seems impossible, and her feelings for him are nothing short of stupid.

But he keeps spending more time with her and keeps requesting that she assist him in research, and one day, he stays late with her even after everyone else has gone home, and from that point on, they work together a lot more often. It becomes easy to talk to him again, even with her crush, because that's just the kind of man he is, and she will always consider him her closest friend, even if she thinks she might be falling in love with him.


End file.
